THE Vatican has determined that limbo does not exist, opening the gates of heaven to babies who die unbaptised, a member of a high-level theological commission.

"The many factors that we have considered ... give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved," says a document published by the US magazine Origins with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.

The medieval concept of limbo as a place where unbaptised infants spend eternity but without communion with God seems to reflect an "unduly restrictive view of salvation," the document says.
The thought that stillborn babies, for example, would be relegated to a kind of no-man's-land in the afterlife tormented generations of Catholic families.

The idea of limbo - from the Latin for "edge" - was meant to address the paradox that unbaptised babies could not go to heaven because their original sin had not been expunged, but nor should they go to purgatory or hell.

In 1984, when Benedict headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said he was "personally" in favour of scrapping the 13th-century notion, which he termed a mere "hypothesis."

He has approved the document drafted by the International Theological Commission, the panel's secretary told reporters, adding however that its conclusions were not to be considered Roman Catholic Church dogma.

A member of the panel, Dijon (France) Archbishop Roland Minnerath, said the 41-page document was completed several weeks ago after deliberations that began in November 2005.

"We cannot know with certainty what will happen" when an unbaptised baby dies, said panel member Paul McPartlan.

"But we have good grounds to hope that God in his mercy and love looks after these children and brings them to salvation," he said, quoted by the Catholic News Service.

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